wtorek, 5 października 2010

Some time ago I published on this blog my review of Step Up 3D in polish. It can be found here. I decided to put it once again in English as a new post now. Enjoy!

Banner advertising Step Up 3D movie in US

Before I’ll start with the review of Step Up 3D the movie (or any other Step Up clone) we need to keep one thing in mind. It is not a normal movie. It is not a movie for an ordinary popcorn eater. It is not a movie for a cinema connoisseur as well. It is a movie about the dance, for people who love the dance. Nothing more, nothing less. Well, OK, maybe a little bit more – in this case I mean street style dance lovers more than dance enthusiasts in general. Those who are into modern, ballet or contemporary may be quite harsh to this flick and will dismiss it at hello, not understanding what’s all this fuss about.

Keeping in mind what’s above, I wanna move on to movie summary, not wasting time on things like so-obvious-that-it-hurts script and cheesy dialogues. Tough, not the dialogues and not the script are the reason for a viewer to visit a cinema. We go to the movies (at least those aware viewers, and not those taken to the cinema by force by their better halves). To see the dance in an XXL package and executed in breathtaking, mind blowing way. And those requirements the movie fulfills in 100%. But what new will we see in Step Up 3D that we haven’t seen before? Is there anything that the previous parts did not show? Will there be anything more, apart from third dimension, which is slowly getting a standard in youngster movies? We sure will. The movie is full of amazing and unreal (yep, from time to time too unreal) dance scenes, and numbers of tasteful pieces, which targeted viewer will absorb with arms wide open. Battles are boosted to maximum with all the Hi Tec Visual tricks. All the sceneries – club dancefloor, training rooms and loft where dancers live, look like locations from young dancer dreams. An acrobatics room, a roof space for the parkour, may cause dreamy gasp. Music wall, built from dozens of various ghetto blasters is just the best sound system ever made. Other thing is, how would that invention work, but let’s not be nitpick. Step Up is in the end a dance fairy tale movie. Precisely. And as the previous flicks where slightly realistic, the new one is a mix of martial arts movie with science fiction production. It’s kind of like, what would happen, if you take ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ and ‘Star Wars: Attack of the Clones’ and tell the main characters to dance to phat beats of Flo’Rida and Swizz Beatz. I don’t really know what was that for. The abilities of the dancers are astonishing enough, and they don’t really need to be mastered so the dancers will jump one-handedly on public toilet sinks (yeah, right!). This, I guess, is a small gift for all those guys, who were forced to go to this movie by their girlfriends. She’ll enjoy the dancing scenes, while he will focus on dance battles, straight from console fighting games. This however, is not the end of all the attractions. I personally, enjoyed the most two movie tasteful bites. First, would be the wall of sneakers. Goddamit! For sneaker freaks, like me, hundreds of unique Dunks, Superstars, Jordans, or Air Force One’s in one place is a pure madness. Producers knew what they do. Nike knew as well, placing their shoes in first and last scene of the movie. On the other hand I wonder how much did Nike pay, so the most desirable shoes of the movie were Dunks and not Adidas. Just a marketing digression. Second scene, for which the producers should get a big round of applause, was a reference to classical musicals with Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. Scene where Moose and Camille walk down the street dancing, is a remake of a scene from Roberta – 1935 musical(!), where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did the step to a song ‘I won’t dance’. In Step Up 3D the song version is slightly refreshed by group District 78. It was a really smart and thoughtful accent to place that scene in a movie, cause it may educate the youths that the dance did not come up suddenly in shows like You Can Dance or Dancing with the Stars and has even longer history then oldschool Dirty Dancing or archaic Saturday Night Fever.

To sum up, this movie is perfect for very narrow and specific group of people that know why they wanna see it. A group which will not grumble about plastic main character looking like foiled Action Man from a Toys’r’Us shelf. They will appreciate tough the presence of Twitch from SYTYCD season 4 and Legacy from season 6. They won’t debate on logics of the movie and wonder how the hell did the main character never met his best friends sister. They will, however, be amazed by the dance rivalry of the two top competitors. If you’re planning to see this movie deliberately, you will like it for sure. If you’re gonna see it by accident, or because you have to, better grab a big popcorn box or focus on your partner because this movie will not find a place on your Top Ten list.